Financial Benefits of a Patient Portal | Satisfied Patient (2024)

Chris Law, thank you for joining today.

Excited to have this, you know, short, jam-packed webinar with you about the financial benefits of a patient portal.

You've got a ton of experience in this background and subject matter expertise.

I'm always constantly talking to clients about the benefits of other areas, and it's amazing to have an expert like you.

Senior Director of Revenue Cycle Management, but more importantly, a long history in this space.

So it's not something you picked up overnight; it's something you've been working on a long time.

Excited to share the financial benefits of a patient portal and talk through that today with you.

So again, thanks for joining about Ryan, and I would love for you to just, you know, kind of tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're up to now.

Okay, Ryan, yeah, thanks for having me.

Very flattered that you would call me an expert.

I think, especially with this portal project that I've been working on and refining and developing portals, I'm probably more an expert trial and error.

I'll take that compliment that's key, that's okay, test and learn.

Absolutely, absolutely.

But yeah, thanks again for having me, and just so I can give your listening and viewing audience a little bit of background on me.

A lot of the portal development that we did, a lot of things we experimented with, were predominantly from my years at Children's Hospital.

We're back in the early millennium; we had a very rudimentary portal.

It really just didn't do a whole lot.

You know, there it was just very basic and primitive in some ways, and the pressure was on from not only my team but also administration that we wanted to build out a much better product that would be user-friendly, you know, all the right buzzwords and everything with both our patients and parents.

I'm lucky enough that I'm getting to revisit some of that portal build-out.

My more recent assignment here at Mayfield, where we've got some good things going on, but we have taken it up a notch, so I get to go back and hopefully not have to reinvent the wheel on this.

But yeah, when you look at my resume experience over there, that's probably what should jump out that most of that happened in the almost 20 years I was back at Children's.

So that's where I cut my teeth, nothing or shaking or moving on education, typical BA and an MBA on there.

No PhD to be found.

Oh, I love it though.

I love that you know it's real-world application and the beautiful thing about it, you know, like we talked about is um, you know, the consumer-friendly aspect of it, right?

So, you know, the why, you know, I'm excited to talk to you because of the why.

The why is a consumer-friendly patient portal, you know, so important and why does it make such a difference in a practice, whether it's children's or, you know, currently at your current practice?

Yeah, I think and the why becomes more heavy that when you either don't have a portal at all or you've got a very primitive one.

I hate some kind of cliche'd on it, but once you start building it out, expanding it and, you know, building it around your processes and practices, you start asking, "How could I? I have never had an expanded portal to begin with."

So, the why becomes, you know, increasingly more predominant.

Then I think it's a great question to ask.

You almost have to ask it from why not once you start getting into it.

You know, for us, and I'm glad you've got those three bullet points that are on there that are very important.

That, um, most of this started with, you know, customer experience and reducing costs.

Um, that was a question that came from leadership at Children's Hospital, which is, okay, you want a portal?

You know, you want to build this out?

You're asking us to spend this money on that rather than buy a new MRI or a new CT or expand the emergency room.

You know, what's this thing going to do for us?

And the two driving factors that always come out first is, okay, what are we going to do that is going to improve the interactions with the patient and the information we're trying to communicate, whether it's the statements, how much you owe, you know, how we can help you with paying your bill, all those good things like that?

But what's it actually going to do to drive the detailed phone conversations that they need to have?

How's it going to drive the other channels down so we actually improve processes and save costs?

So, those questions usually come up early and often at the beginning, but I think the secret sauce usually ends up in the second bullet, which is, you know, actually the whole concept of the industry as a whole seems to struggle because it's so complex.

How these patients or parents with Children's Hospital can actually navigate through this revenue cycle process, this billing process, because it's not automatically intuitive.

It's not as easy as checking out at your local grocery store.

It's very complicated.

So, once you get in there and start empowering the patients to be able to do their own navigation then you can start including them actually in the process to improve it, you know, process forward.

So, I mean, there's just a lot of different things that go into that second bullet, Ryan.

You and I could do a whole presentation on that by itself.

I'm talking about, you know, every practice, every hospital is different on how they get there, but, you know, they have to get there.

They have to get there.

I think you'll find that your patients, if they haven't vocalized it, they're going to vocalize it by the volume in your other channels.

So, if they're calling you, you know, twice as much as they should, it's probably because they're not empowered to go ahead and get the basic answers themselves through the portal or somewhere that you can provide.

Yeah, huge reduction in cost, I mean, right? So, you're reducing the call volume.

Those patients or parents as you mentioned in that space, I mean, you know, they're going online.

I think about it in my own experience, right?

Do I want to wait on hold or can I self-serve through, you know, this patient portal?

And, and you're right, I mean, tremendous impact on reducing those overhead costs and, uh, and the second one, the financial responsibility.

I mean, yeah, um, yeah, and tell me a little bit about the last one, you know, the increasing patient satisfaction while increasing the revenue flow.

Yeah, and I should say the sweet spot for administration on that is, is there anybody that says, why, you know, why do you do this in business?

Survival is that you want to be able to connect the clinical cycle, the patient experience cycle with the revenue cycle and that shows up in the revenue flow.

So, if the steps are easier and the people are more empowered to do things themselves, you know, you don't have to worry about the longer you're in connection with them on a phone call, the more emotion can enter in, the more distraction can enter in, those type of things get taken on equation if they're empowered and they're interacting directly.

And, quite honestly, you're giving them more options, more time options to pay, so they can go in there two o'clock in the afternoon and go to two o'clock in the morning, you know, to wait on you that's right cash.

So, that's another thing I would push a portal on this too, that if you don't have one or if you've got a primitive one, is that I think you're missing out on that opportunity.

The other thing and kind of reference the JD Power, uh, logos that you've got in there is that, uh, we were looking for a validation step and it was very important to us to make sure that we utilized who we thought was a key validator for quality and excellence and we, you know, got certified by JD Power seven years in a row.

That in itself was really helpful to go back to the first bullet.

I didn't have to sing for my lunch every time we wanted to invest in the portal or customer service programs or processes that we wanted to add.

We had street cred, very, very important in doing that and I think anybody who goes through that, you've got to prove your um, your leadership, your return on investment.

And while we had good patient SAT scores coming in and everything, I think the crowning moment was getting a good validation step like JD Power.

So, I'm happy to kind of snuck that in there with this JD Power awards, but it's more than just winning the award and having the ego, you know, for the moment.

You leverage using something like that to get what you want in the future.

Absolutely, absolutely. It's an honor and an amazing accomplishment with JD Power and the association there and, um, you know, it's a lot of hard work and I think that's the other piece of it, you know, that, um, you know, you're being very modest about but uh, it's uh, it does take a lot of, a lot of hard work.

You gotta roll up your sleeves.

You know, the empowering the patient component.

You know, and your success at Cincinnati Children's Hospital again.

You had a team of people helping you, and you're orchestrating this.

And you know, you've got your vision like we talked about and the benefits of it.

But, um, you know, share a little bit more about, you know, empowering the patient.

And then I'd love to hear, you know, share with us about, you know, the benefits and the results that you saw at Children's Hospital.

Yeah, I mean, we definitely started from the back end and had a lot of success with it.

And our IT department put the pressure on us to move that success forward.

Not all hospitals and practices move in that direction.

It's just we were kind of ahead of the industry at the time and pushing and developing our portal.

We had a very good vendor who was actually helping us, you know, go outside the box to create solutions, sure, in that regard.

So, we were ahead of Epic on MyChart.

We were already four or five years ahead.

So, oddly enough, when the RT department came a-knocking to figure out ways to build out most of the contacts, most of the volume numbers to prove where the volume was channeling was coming through the billing portal.

So they wanted to start there and try to incorporate that in there, if anything, just purely to get their numbers up.

Yeah, so they came to us and said, 'Hey, how can we get, you know, because we're an Epic shop over Children's, they came to us and said, basically, what do we need to do to start putting where your, you know, your success and where you've done the improvements on there, how can we get that into MyChart?'

It was a little bit of a struggle because we had moved kind of with lightning success that we were still beyond MyChart at that time with our functionality.

So, it was kind of tough pushing back on IT, going, 'You guys got to catch up with us a little bit. We don't want to surrender certain things.'

And those things that we were talking about surrendering were around empowerment, the ability for the patient to be able to get in there and do certain things, be able to find certain things.

And, uh, eventually, MyChart caught up.

Happy ending on all that stuff.

But the idea behind it was, is that we were in that period of time before MyChart came up, we were actually including the patient, or excuse me, the patient's family in the development of the portal.

So, Experian was great, you know, as our portal developer.

They actually said we're gonna fly in.

We're gonna actually help you run your focus group.

I'm going to be sitting here.

Our client rep was sitting there on one side of a PC.

His programmer in Seattle was sitting back on the other side of the PC.

We had about 10 families in there with all these ideas on how to improve the portal.

And we made the changes real time in front of them.

That's great!

It was amazing, and I think other people have probably done that since then.

I mean, 10 years on this now, yeah.

But the idea behind it was that the concept, while it wasn't novel, sometimes in healthcare because of how we drag our feet on things, it was novel for healthcare at the time.

So, we uh, we pulled the families in.

And I remember this, this couple, we actually had a husband and wife couple in there.

"We had the demographic going over here. We had a 19-year-old, sure life. We had a physician who was actually an emergency room doc at children's who also was a mom. Yeah, so we had the whole thing, you know, different you know economic demographics."

But I would still remember that couple.

They looked at each other and said, "Well, that was nice. Then when are we going to see the changes?"

Paul looked straight at him and said, "Log off, log back on. Everything you just told us is in there right now."

And well, JD Power was a great validator for us to get things pushed through with our leadership.

The buy-in from the families, it was like light bulbs were going off on this stuff that they felt like they had a voice in the product that they were going to use.

I mean, we don't use the product, we just administrate the product.

It benefits us in certain ways, but we're not really the users, so to speak.

Having your customers actually involved in that was uh, it went a long way and it went a long way because they were really voicing navigation and how you can put me in charge of my navigation, which is empowerment, absolutely, absolutely on that.

Almost everything we did moving forward, um, sorry to say that uh, I mean Epic does things that are just amazing for its interoperability inside the system.

But we weren't able to employ quite the strategies that we did with our customer engagement once we got deeper into Epic because we just got to call it what it is, Epic is a huge system, it doesn't give you the flexibility to pivot quickly like that.

Having said that, I think Cincinnati Children's did a great job in developing that MyChart portal out as best they could and continue to develop it out really well.

That um, while we had those shortcomings that I think all that tech was, was advanced outside of Epic, it didn't get caught up and they should, Epic should do a job, so I think that's a happy ending over there, hopefully a happy ending across the industry, yeah.

And you, RealTime Feedback, had a great example, I mean, of taking real-time feedback from your users who are going to be using it, um, you know, similar to uh, you know, how we, how we roll things out here at Satisfied Patient, but in terms of the software process, but you know, a lot of places don't do that, you know, a lot of them don't, you know, they roll it out because they think that's the best user experience, you know, with very limited use cases, and then next thing you know, their patient satisfaction surveys come back and you know, they have low marks because it's hard to use or hard to navigate.

Back to your earlier points, you know, one of those first, that bullet on there, increase patient satisfaction scores by 66, you know, you know, tell me about you know, some of these results, I mean, these are incredible.

Yeah, that was actually a pretty quick improvement that happened. It had just as much to do with um, Experian who helped us get a very progressive statement vendor at the exact same time we were switching the portal.

So it was kind of like a really nice Mutton Jeff show where they would complement each other, um, that we got the statements improved and all the logic that we put into the communication with the statements, we tried to parallel it in the portal so the friendliness would, you know, cross over.

And it was important, you know, we try to communicate with people that statements are just snapshots, go to the portal and you can get real time, so that was kind of how we wanted to kind of introduce things uh with those statements to get uh to get over to uh the portal.

But um, we had a disintegrating customer service uh score uh occurring with our previous vendor.

We were all the way down.

At the time I thought it was fantastic.

I thought 45 is what we were with in our statements and portal, and I thought this is why, again go back to that first page on why you do it, because I was naive and thought that 47 on my CSAT scores was really good on the portal.

We changed vendors, implemented the portal, Chase statement vendors implemented the portal, and then all of a sudden we're running a 90-plus percent satisfaction rate on the communication in our statements and in the portal.

Yeah, you're there going, "47? That's an F, right?"

Your only standard going on at the time, so...

At any rate, that that was a blow away for us, and that happened in the first year.

That happened in the first year we hadn't even gotten to the depth of the portal yet.

Yeah, but it was already there, it was already there.

Um, by the time we got about two years in, we were really cooking with gas.

And the funny story of the JD Power thing on that was, um, our portal phone tree... they had them as a combined category back then in healthcare.

Uh, we were the winner of that award, I think it was like in 2011.

And we're all laughing going, "My God, we took a simplicity approach, which is that we wanted our phone tree to be one level.

We wanted our portal to be ultra simple with big Fisher-Price buttons on them."

And all this other stuff, we didn't go elaborate with all these navigator bars across the top and on the side and all these things, you know?

We were incredibly simple, yeah, and our scores were so high we won the portal and uh, phone vector category, one that you're in healthcare.

So it was almost a laugh.

Keep it simple, the KISS method, that's it.

That's it, yeah, that's uh, it's so true.

I mean, that's, you know, one of the things again, you know, with Satisfied Patient, you know everybody knows kind of Collections, the what and the why, and it's, it's you know, boils down to how you do it right.

And the yeah, and the how is is kind of everyone's kind of secret sauce, and it looks like you guys, you know, cracked it with the simplicity of it and in terms of the collections, right?

I mean, collections, You know, obviously a reduction in costs, um, but you know, big growth in collections, right?

Yeah, it was the collections.

Well, we were collecting 24/7 on the portal.

I mean, that was the first thing that jumped out at us.

We were collecting 24/7 on the portal, 365 days a year.

And so, when you're only open 2,080 hours a year on the phones and you're basically more than doubling that, you should be collecting more money.

So, what it did is it took our phone call volume down from about... yeah, we don't have a huge center, you know, we take about 150,000 phone calls at that time a year, but we knocked it down to 110,000 phone calls.

Yeah, we took 40,000 phone calls out of our volume and we upped our collections by 10 to 15% because we are open 24/7.

Oh, that's awesome, that's awesome, yeah.

These are amazing results, um, you know, in the adoption piece, you know, you know, tell me a little about uh, you know, at the end here, the adoption, I mean, increasing the online adoption from 900 to more than 35,000 consumers. Yeah, the story on that was...Um, you know, Pivotal, those were the difference between 12 months of go-live, one month of shutting down the previous portal, and 11 months after going live with the new portal and the new statements.

But we basically were at a high mark of nine to ten thousand enrollees in our previous portal.

And there was just a disintegration factor.

We were having issues that we couldn't do certain things with the statement.

The connectivity and the portal between our professional billing and the hospital billing was having issues.

Um, and our subscription and the portal nose-dived all the way down to 900 before we switched.

Before we switched portal vendors, 11 months later, enrollment was up at 35,000.

So, not only did it just blow away where we were in the 12 months, it also tripled almost tripled the enrollment that we had with the previous vendor.

That's awesome, that's awesome, yeah, it was, it was amazing, it was.

Yeah, those were illuminating times when we did that.

It was interesting that we knew things were going to work, we just didn't know how well it was going to work, yeah, like Don Shula in 1972.

I think we're going to win the division.

I know we're going to win 14 games and not lose one. That's the way it felt, yeah.

Wow.

It's amazing, I mean, you know, when I first, uh, you know, when we first connected and you know, we're talking through these things, I mean, it's, it's remarkable what you guys have accomplished.

And um, you know, all those things we're talking about are still true to this day, right?

And so that's what I love about it.

I mean, you know, number one, the, you know, like we talked about before, right, that increase in you know, the patient satisfaction component, the patient experiencing, you know, allowing that person at 2 am to pay their bill online or to schedule an appointment where they don't have to come in and, you know, the phone reduction.

Um, you know, and the ongoing collections piece, um, you know, it's the right thing to do. You've got an amazing case study, Chris Law.

I can't thank you enough.

I know our Satisfied Patient clients are going to love to hear this, love to hear this from you so, again, thank you so much, uh, Chris Law, appreciate you, uh, your time today. So, you know...Thank you again.

Oh Ryan, it was an absolute pleasure.

Um, and you know, whoever wants to do something more expanded on this, if you're, if your customers, your clients have any more interest, uh, be happy to work with you again on this, get even more information out to them.

Thanks again, sounds great, thanks Chris.